Justice (2023 | USA | 85 minutes | Doug Liman)

first take: I don’t know that I expected a Court-shaking bombshell from Doug Liman’s last-minute Sundance doc, but there’s little new in Justice. Instead it reinforces the credibility of the allegations against Kavanaugh and the fact that fifty Senators simply didn’t care.

For a documentary that got a splashy last-minute addition to Sundance — a one-night-only opening weekend slot, no less — there’s not much particularly new in Doug Liman’s Justice. Focusing on the sexual misconduct allegations that almost derailed the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings, he revisits Christine Blasey Ford who bravely came forward to recount an assault perpetrated on her by the future Supreme Court nominee at a high school party. With supportive interviews from friends and experts, it further establishes her credibility and the “indelible in the hippocampus” recollections that she detailed before the Senate Judiciary committee.

Alongside this recent history, Liman also spotlights the other allegation that arose during the hearings, but received a less bright spotlight: Deborah Ramirez’s account of an encounter with Kavanaugh’s penis at a drunken Yale dorm room party. Liman allows Ramirez to share her story — her personal history as quiet biracial Connecticut student out of place at an Ivy League school, the humiliation of the event, and coming to terms with her memories as an adult. He also broadens the net to include comments from former classmates whose communications at the time of the nomination suggest that Kavanaugh’s testimony was riddled with perjury. Perhaps this will feel fresh to the small proportion of any audience for this film not laser focused on the tick-tock of the breaking news, constant coverage, and explosive reporting in the New York Times, Washington Post, and New Yorker as the business of confirmation ground through the national news.

Still, the film is told swiftly and competently, with Liman and producer Amy Herdy compiling a compact, engaging, and swiftly moving package. Along the way, they turn up a new audio recording and underscore the complicity of the White House and the disinterest of the FBI on following up on the thousands of tips submitted during the brief, cursory investigation of Ramirez’s claims. It also forces us to spend more time looking at Kavanaugh’s face, relive his angry performance, and confront his under oath declarations of his love for beer. As a document of recent history, it primarily serves to stokes blind rage about the cold hard fact that fifty US Senators simply weren’t bothered enough by the very credible allegations to vote against his lifetime appointment to the country’s most powerful court.